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Shane Roush, right, was sentenced yesterday to 25 years in prison on a federal
manufacturing-marijuana charge. That time will be served concurrently to his 25-year sentence for
the 2010 attack on Morrow County Deputy Sheriff Brandon Moore.Story, Page A4

MOUNT GILEAD, Ohio — Word on the street was that some guy, somewhere in rural Morrow County, was
growing marijuana. And these snitches weren’t talking about a couple of stalks hidden among tomato
plants in some overgrown backyard.

This was no amateur with an illegal hobby. This was a business, with thousands of mature,
well-tended plants harvested each year.

But the information from confidential informants was trickling in and not very specific.
Authorities were only beginning to sniff around.

That was in the fall of 2010.

“Nothing could be pinpointed,” Brenneman said. “We were just starting to develop what might have
been credible information.”

Yet even as authorities worked to develop leads, their man was spiraling out of control.

Shane Roush generally had been known to his neighbors as a kook with a penchant for
firepower.

His neighbors later told authorities that they knew he always carried a gun, that he chased away
anyone who came near his property — wandering teenagers, hunters, surveyors, the meter reader. At
one point, he shot at a neighbor’s border collie simply to shoo it away.

Roush’s wife would say later that her husband kept a loaded gun by his side all the time. Just
in case.

Then came the afternoon of Oct. 21, 2010. Roush was in body armor and armed with a knife, a
holstered 40-caliber handgun and a Sig Sauer AR-15 assault rifle when he ambushed Deputy Brandon
Moore. Moore had come to investigate a property dispute between Roush and his neighbors.

Despite taking heavy rifle fire and being hit by bullets four times and grazed by another, Moore
emptied the 16 rounds in his own .40-caliber handgun, hitting Roush twice in the legs. As both men
lay wounded, the call of shots fired crackled across the radio and, within minutes, the place
swarmed with law enforcement.

It took only a few minutes from arrival for authorities to realize they had more on their hands
than they had bargained for.

Agents from the ATF, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and local detectives spent the
next several days tearing apart the Roushes’ house and scouring their 2 acres.

A field of pot stood tall. Agents hand dug each plant to preserve the roots as evidence: 874 in
all. Inside a professional-grade greenhouse they found 75 more plants, cut and drying.

Some 800 were stacked in piles in the basement of the house and still hundreds more, moldy and
cloyingly rancid, lay tossed aside. The final tally topped 1,700 plants.

Recordings and transcripts of interviews that authorities conducted with Roush and his wife,
Corrina, and documents in the case file at the prosecutor’s office cast a spotlight on what life
must have been like inside that remote ranch home on County Road 179.

Corrina Roush was 16 and a high-school dropout when they married in 1991. Her husband, she said,
was mean to her and their two daughters.

His attorneys say he was always an unsettled loner. He had worked for 15 years at a local
Whirlpool factory but injured his back in 2005. Despite a $40,000 worker’s compensation settlement,
Corrina Roush told authorities they couldn’t get by.She took a job at Subway, and they decided to
grow flowers in the greenhouse.

“But the flowers didn’t turn out,” she told detectives.

So, a clearly skeptical detective asked, how did a failed flower business quickly become such a
huge marijuana operation, one conservatively estimated to have brought the couple at least $100,000
annually in each of the several years they said they’d been growing?

She answered that they already had the greenhouses and the fertilizer and an irrigation system,
so why not? “People always said, ‘If I had all that, that’s what I’d do.’ So we did.”

Sheriff Brenneman said Roush seemed to be preparing for war. The place was an armory, with
cabinets stocked with high-powered guns: pistols, revolvers, shotguns, war- and police-caliber
assault rifles chief among them.

Knives sat on display shelves, and swords and sabers hung from suspended racks, even from the
curtain rods.

Ammunition belts wrapped around the bedposts, and boxes of shells had been tossed into closets,
tucked into corners and buried under piles of clothes.

The Nazi Party flag hung in a bedroom, as did another with a symbol oft-connected to the
neo-Nazi movement. An armband with a Nazi Party symbol hung on the wall. Roush told detectives that
he just liked history.

He told authorities that he traded weed for guns and guns for cars. He said he bought some
weapons online, some from gun shops, several from the guy who owned a car wash in Fredericktown and
that he traded with members of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club for more. He paid cash for almost
everything he owned.

Brenneman considered the possibility of ties to Ohio’s well-organized underground militia.

“We figured this was bigger, much bigger, than just Shane Roush,” he said. Now, some 20 months
later, Brenneman said it’s possible Roush operated independently but acknowledges that he might
never really know.

“I wasn’t really surprised by all the weapons he had gotten,” he said. “You’d be surprised how
easy it is to do.”

When all was done, agents carted out 28 sabers and swords, 104 guns and more than 29,000 rounds
of ammunition.

Shane Roush said he charged $1,600 or $2,000 a pound for pot, and people were coming to the
house and buying two or three pounds each week.

Yet when the shootout went down, the couple appeared to be broke because they hadn’t yet cut the
ripened crop of marijuana in the field.

Corrina Roush said she had stopped answering the phone because too many bill collectors were
calling and they were behind on their mortgage payments. She told authorities that she didn’t even
have enough money that week to put gas in their daughter’s Hyundai Tiburon because she’d just spent
$30,000 in drug money to pay her daughter’s tuition bill at the University of Akron.

Their property is now abandoned. Brenneman said it’s in foreclosure and will soon go to sheriff’s
sale. The vehicles seized in the case will be sold, and the profits put back into
drug-interdiction efforts to stop the next bad guy who comes along.

Deputy Moore, after multiple surgeries and months of grueling therapy, returned to duty at the
sheriff’s office in March.

Corrina Roush, now 37, has pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the marijuana operation.
She will be sentenced later this month.

Shane Roush, now 40, is serving a 25-year prison sentence after pleading guilty last year to
charges of attempted murder and felonious assault for the attack. And yesterday, U.S. District
Judge Algenon L. Marbley sentenced him to 25 years on a federal charge of cultivating marijuana, to
be served concurrently to the other. A federal weapons charge was dropped as part of a plea
agreement.

But a copy of a letter in the prosecutor’s file, one he wrote to his wife from jail in 2011,
reads as if Roush is far from out of the business: “I tell my roommies(SIC) about all we had and
the way we lived. They are amazed. Like I’m telling a story or a lie. They all want a piece of the
action. I have more connections now then I had before. He! He! (smiley face) They all want me to
stay in contact with them. So when I get out, they want to hook up with me.”